by Sarah Dessen
Sometimes I missed the whole movie-restaurant-mini-golf-basketball-game kind of dating lifestyle. But this was just how it was with Rogerson. He had a lot of nervous energy, business to attend to, and frankly I couldn’t really picture him standing in front of a windmill at Jungle Golf, lining up his shot. That was more of a Mike Evans thing, and I’d made my choice there. So I was happy to be with Rogerson, in transit, always with a bit of a buzz and his hand on my knee. It was just fine.
“So what do you guys do, anyway?” Rina always asked me. Her quarterback was a date kind of guy—they were always going out to dinner, or to the movies, or double-dating with other couples. I couldn’t see Rogerson doing that, either.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “We just hang out.”
That was the only way I could describe it. Most of the time spent with Rogerson was in the car, him driving and me in the passenger seat, his fingers spread across my knee. He’d take me to McDonald’s and buy me chocolate shakes, which he already knew were my favorite, or drive us out to Topper Lake, where we’d take the car onto the flats and listen to the radio. The only time we ever argued was about music.
Rogerson liked classic rock. Pink Floyd, his favorite, depressed the hell out of me. So whenever he left me alone in the car, engine running, I’d change the station to G103, cranking it up to fill the air around me with bouncy pop tunes, the kind that get stuck in your head all day and all night long, like a soundtrack in your dreams. Rogerson would come out of the Quik Zip, or down the stairs of someone’s apartment, and head for the car. I’d watch his expression change as he got closer, hearing the strains of one of my baby-babyoh-please-baby songs.
“Oh, my God,” he said to me once as he flopped into the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut behind him. “What is this shit?”
“Number one in the country,” I told him smugly, even as he reached forward, hitting one of the preset buttons. Suddenly we were surrounded by the sound of funereal gonging, interwoven with some woman moaning.
“See,” he said, pointing to the radio, “now that’s music.”
“No,” I told him, hitting another preset—the one I’d changed a few days earlier, when he’d been busy pumping gas—“this is.”
But it wasn’t. Instead, it was some woman singing about dandruff control.
“Nice,” he said, snapping his fingers as if it was just so catchy. “Better than most of the stuff you listen to.”
“Shut up,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“I don’t even know why you like that,” he said, cranking the engine.
“I don’t even know why I like you,” I replied, as the dandruff song finally ended.
“Yes, you do,” he said, turning his head to back us out of the parking lot.
“I do?”
“Yeah.” He smiled at me. “It’s the hair.”
And then he changed the station again.
My mother tut-tutted, worrying about me being out too much, until my father reminded her that Cass, too, had dated and managed to juggle her various responsibilities. Still, whenever the phone rang past nine, I’d watch a ripple pass over my mother’s face, or hear her sigh just loudly enough so we could all hear it.
Within a week I’d stopped riding home with the team and squad, leaving instead in the BMW with him. We’d pull up beside the bus at a stoplight and I’d see everyone grouped in the back, laughing and talking, and know that Rina was probably on someone’s lap, that Kelly and Chad were making out, and that Coach Harrock was halfheartedly telling everyone to quiet down, please, and reflect on the game. Rina would always look out and wave, smiling, but the rest of the girls and the team just looked down at us, lips moving and brows instantly furrowing as they discussed me.
“God, they’re all staring,” I said to Rogerson the first time it happened. “I don’t even want to know what they’re saying.”
“Why do you care?” he said, switching gears with a squeal—he drove like a crazy person—as we moved up the smooth orange of the bus. “They’re a bunch of idiots. I don’t know why you’d want to hang out with them anyway.”
That was Rogerson, or so I was learning. He divided the world coolly into black or white, no grays or middle ground. People were either cool or assholes, situations good or bad. My friends, and my life at school, consistently fell into each of the latter. His friends were older, more interesting, and, most importantly, not jocks or cheerleaders. When we did go to parties where I’d see Rina or Kelly Brandt or anyone else from the squad, it was always awkward. They’d want me to stay, pulling up a chair, handing over the quarter so I could take a bounce. But Rogerson was always impatient, finishing whatever business he had and heading straight to the door, making it clear he was ready to go.
Now, as we passed them, I looked up at the bus windows, seeing the faces I’d spent the last few months with: Kelly, Mike Evans, Melinda, the offensive line. And they all looked right back at me, still staring, as if we were some strange culture to be studied and discussed.
Whenever Rogerson trashed them I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I’d hung out with them. It had just sort of happened, like everything else in my life. Now, with him, I felt finally like I was making my own choices, living wide awake after being in a dreamworld so long.
I kept my eyes on the faces in the windows of the bus, staring back hard as Rogerson hit the gas, shifting gears again, and we were gone, leaving them to be just a bright orange speck in the sideview mirror, falling farther and farther behind me.
I got home after practice one unseasonably warm afternoon in mid-November to find our back glass patio door open and my mother and Boo sitting outside in lawn chairs. The garden plot in the side yard had been turned over, and a few packages of flower bulbs lay nearby, some open, a trowel abandoned at the foot of my mother’s chair. From the kitchen I could see the TV was on in the living room, low volume: Lamont Whipper came on at six sharp. The warm air was blowing through the back door, stirring the stale air of our house with the smell of a misplaced spring. Outside, however, it was already starting to get dark, the sky streaked with deep pinks and grays.
“Oh, Boo, you’re awful,” my mother was saying, her voice drifting into the kitchen. The chairs were arranged so their backs were to me, just the top of their heads—my mother‘s, carefully coiffed and in a bun, Boo’s, wild red with a couple of chopsticks poking out at strange angles—peeking over and visible from where I was standing by the counter.
“You mastered pottery,” Boo said. “I think coed massage is the next logical step.”
“Boo, really,” my mother said. “What would Jack say?”
Boo considered this, then chuckled. “Okay, so massage is out. For now. How about ... introduction to aromatherapy?”
“What’s that?”
“Using scents to calm and ease,” Boo explained, flipping the page. “But it can get kind of smelly and boring. How about cake decorating?”
“Too fattening,” my mother said, and Boo clucked her tongue, agreeing.
“Well, are you specifically interested in anything?” Boo asked her.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Cassandra and I had always talked about taking a photography class. She said my family pictures were so bad, since I always cut off people’s heads. We were going to do it over the summer, but then she went to the beach, and was so busy there, and then ...”
Then her voice just dropped off, suddenly, and I could hear Boo turning pages, smoothly, one right after another. Neither one of them said anything as I crossed the kitchen to the fridge, opened it, then shut it again.
“I’ve written her five times now,” my mother said suddenly, and as I turned to look out at them again I saw it was getting dark more quickly now, harder to make out their shapes against the sunset. “I never know what to say. It’s so hard to put it into words.”
“She’ll write when she’s ready,” Boo said, turning another page. I was sure she couldn’t even see the words in front of her
, now.
“I still can’t believe she could have been unhappy. I mean, when we went to buy those pillow shams for Yale, she was so excited. Just as excited as me. I know she was.”
There was something so lonely in her voice, something that made me look back out at her suddenly. But it was so dark I couldn’t even make her out, and this made me sadder still.
“I don’t think it was about you,” Boo said softly, and I could tell by her tone that she’d said it before, often, in just the same way.
“Then what could it have been, that she couldn’t tell me? What?”
“I don’t know, Margaret,” Boo said. “I just don’t know.”
And there it was. Even with the dolls, and the crooked pottery vases, even with my cheerleading and bake sales and fretting over my relationship with Rogerson, my mother still couldn’t fill the space left behind by my older, more dynamic, more everything, sister. We might have felt like things were going on, seasons changing, months passing. But we would have been wrong.
The door slammed downstairs, announcing my father’s arrival. “Hello,” he called out, as he always did, and I heard him stop to flip through the mail on the sideboard as he hung up his coat.
“Oh, that’s Jack,” my mother said, and suddenly she was walking through the patio door, squinting in the sudden light, one hand reaching back to smooth her hair. She seemed startled when she saw me. “Oh! Caitlin, honey, how long have you been home?”
“I just got here,” I said.
Boo walked up and stood in the doorway, tucking her catalog under one arm. When she smiled at me, her eyes crinkled in the corners, freckles folding in on each other. “Hey, beautiful,” she said. “Want to take a photography class with us?”
My mother was crossing the room from the fridge now, opening the oven to slide in a casserole. I could hear my father coming up the stairs, his footsteps heavy.
“Sure,” I said.
“Caitlin, I don’t know,” my mother said, shutting the oven. “You’re so busy with practice and school, I’m not sure it would be best.”
“I’m not that busy,” I said. I’d only been trying to help. “But, whatever. If you don’t want—”
“No, I’m just saying,” my mother said quickly, setting the oven timer with a few jabs of her finger. “I just thought that maybe—”
“Then it’s settled,” Boo said over both of us, reaching up to adjust one of her chopsticks, jabbing it on the other side of her head. “Photography it is. Just us girls.”
“Well,” my mother said, crossing the kitchen to pull a bag of rolls out of the fridge. “I guess if it’s on the weekends ...”
“No arguments,” Boo said. “Classes begin in two weeks. Saturdays at noon. Okay?”
My mother glanced at the clock—it was almost six—and then into the living room, where the talk show before Lamont Whipper was rolling credits up the screen. “Well, okay,” she said. “I really should—”
“Go,” Boo told her. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”
“See you then,” my mother said, waving over her shoulder as she walked out of the kitchen to the TV, as the Lamont Whipper theme music came on. Boo looked at me and smiled again, cocking her head to the side as if she’d known I’d been standing there, listening to them all along.
“You holding up okay?” she said suddenly, and the last of the sunset was so pink behind her. I remembered how I’d wished all those nights in my room that she was my mother as I watched Stewart glide down the slope of their lawn, bike chains rattling, under the moonlight. Sometimes it seemed like she was the only one who even noticed I was alive.
“Sure,” I said, unable to stop myself from turning to see my own real mother pull a chair closer to the television, leaning in for the slightest glimpse of the one face she would recognize, the only one she wanted to see. “I’m fine.”
It was about a week later that I was stuck in practice for an extra twenty minutes while Chelsea Robbins drilled us, again and again, on a new dance routine she’d come up with during a bout of inspiration at a Baptist Youth retreat. It involved a lot of backflips, a pyramid, and a complicated formation that was supposed to result in us all lying down in various positions to form a tiger (our mascot) but instead ended up looking like some variation of a sloth without a head.
“This is ridiculous,” Rina—who was making up part of the mouth—said after our fifth try. “All anyone is going to be doing is trying to look up our skirts anyway. It’s humiliating.”
“Ladies!” Chelsea yelled at Melinda Trudale and me. We were supposed to be forming the tiger’s chest but our legs were too short. Above us, we could hear rain pounding on the roof: It was pouring. “Extend! You have to extend!”
“Screw extending,” Melinda said under her breath. “It’s six-friggin‘ o’clock. I’m going home.”
“One more run-through,” Chelsea said, reaching over to rewind the music—our school fight song, set to a disco beat—again. But, led by Melinda, everyone was now getting up, grumbling and shaking the floor dust out of their sweatpants and T-shirts, and heading for their backpacks and the parking lot. “Fine, fine,” Chelsea said in a clipped tone, grabbing the tape player and yanking the cord out of the wall. “We’ll start fresh tomorrow. And think formation, please. Think teamwork!”
“Think therapy,” Rina said, nudging me with her elbow as she passed, on her way to meet Bill Skeritt, who was standing by the doorway waiting for her. “See you later, okay?” she said as he looped his arm around her waist, leaning to kiss her neck. She laughed, pushing him off, while her fingers looped around his wrist, at the same time pulling him closer.
“See you,” I said. Everyone was filing out of the gym, talking and complaining about Chelsea, while I bent down to grab my books and jacket. The rain was still coming down, beating hard overhead. When I stood up, Mike Evans was right behind me.
“Hey, Caitlin,” he said. He was wearing his letter jacket and his hair was damp, curling slightly over his collar.
“Hi.” I slung my backpack over my shoulder, glancing at the doors that led to the outer building. I was hoping for Rina, or Melinda Trudale, or even Chelsea Robbins and her boom box, anyone to stop this inevitable discussion I was about to have with saltine-esque Mike Evans, whom I hadn’t been really face-to-face with since the night I rejected both him and his letter jacket and ran off with Rogerson, never looking back.
But the hallway, and the gym, were empty. It was just us.
“So,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets, “how’ve you been?”
“Um, good,” I said, taking a step closer to the door and glancing—hint, hint—at my watch. “I really should—”
“So what happened that night, at the party?” he asked me suddenly, and I felt so uncomfortable I just looked at my shoes, the shiny wooden gym floor beneath them. “I mean, I thought you liked me. Rina said you did.”
“Mike,” I said.
“And then you leave with that guy.” The way he said it Rogerson could have been some infectious disease involving pus, boils, and graphic bodily functions. “I mean, what was that all about?”
Before, I might have tried to squirm out of it. But my obligation to Mike Evans had been small at best.
“It’s not really your business,” I said, affecting my best Cass coolness. “And it’s late. I really have to go—”
“You should know what people are saying about you,” he blurted out quickly as I turned away from him. “I mean, someone should tell you.”
“What who is saying about me?” I said. The rain was letting up some, but I could still hear it, plinking overhead.
“Everyone,” he said. “The team, the rest of the cheerleaders.”
Like these were important people, the most important people, and their opinions should be of utmost importance to me. And for one split second, standing under that roof with the rain banging overhead, I knew why Cass had left, could almost have been her, in that instant. Maybe she got tired of her strings b
eing pulled, too.
“I don’t care what people are saying,” I said slowly, turning my face up to look Mike square in the eye.
“This Rogerson,” he said, and it was strange to hear him say his name. “He’s been in a lot of trouble, Caitlin. I’ve heard stories. I mean, he’s not your type.”
“You don’t even know him,” I said, suddenly defensive of Rogerson, seeing him holding his face the night of his parents’ party, how dark his eyes were. “You don’t even know me.”
“Oh, come on,” he said, smiling. “Of course I do.”
But he didn’t. He knew Cass, and Rina. But Mike Evans had never said more than ten words to me before that night we were supposed to suddenly become a couple. He was just a stupid jock who wanted a cheerleader—not me. Not even close.
“I’m leaving,” I said, brushing past him.
“Wait,” he said, reaching out and grabbing me by the arm. I looked down at his fingers, spread over the fabric of my shirt, and then up at his face. “Listen to me. I’m just trying—”
“Let go,” I said, trying to pull away.
“Just hold on.” He gripped me harder, his fingers pulling at the fabric. “Listen.” The rain was hitting hard now, so loud I almost didn’t hear the door banging open in front of me.
Rogerson was standing there. His hair was wet, dripping down onto the shiny wooden floor, and his jeans and jacket were both damp and dark, as dark as his eyes.
Mike dropped his hand, quickly.
“Caitlin,” Rogerson said. I could barely hear him above the rain. But even as he spoke, he wasn’t looking at me; his eyes were on Mike. “What’s going on?”
“Hey, man,” Mike Evans said, too loudly, as he put another arm’s length between us, “we’re just talking here. That’s all.”